Traveling Companions

“Missions is not the ultimate goal of the church. Worship is. Missions exists because worship doesn’t.”
― John Piper

This is how I sometimes feel about the Unitarian Universalist involvement in Pride Parades, protests, and “volunteer opportunities”.

I went to Pride Day once before I joined my Congregation. It was fun, though I spent a good portion of the parade tying protesters up in discussion, telling them things they needed to know about their Bible. I enjoyed the festival after and got a lot of really great information at the booths. More over, I was there as an ally, and a person who wanted to be around other people who were, at least for the day, unashamed of who they really were and what their families look like. I wasn’t part of a group or movement; I was just a friend who wanted to celebrate their lives with them.

I’ve been to Pride Day 3 times since joining Horizon, and each time I was a participant in the parade, and I spent at least a little time in our booth, telling people about who we are and what we believe, and mostly handing out free water, because it is really hot in Texas in September. It is fun, and it does lead to some good conversation, but I’m not gay. No one in my immediate family is gay, or even bisexual, as far as they are telling. I’m not active in an outreach program. I’m not an official member of any kind of political organization. I just go to a church; a welcoming, Universalist, liberal church, but that earns me a place in the parade. We march, as a group. Why?

Are we really there for support? Are we there to tell the LGBT community that they aren’t going to hell? If they were worried about it, our simple presence in the parade isn’t likely to assure them. Are we there because LGBT church members want to show off their community? If so, why aren’t they our organizers, and why are they outnumbered? Are we just there as part of our ongoing membership drive? It certainly seems like this is at least part of the reason we are handing out fans with the 7 Principles printed on them.

Why do we celebrate civil disobedience? Is it solely because we want to see people moved to do brave things, or is it because it means a headline now and then? Headlines aren’t bad things, mind you, but they aren’t missional. They are sound-bites; the snack cake of wisdom: sweet, but void of nutrition. They don’t feed the intellect or the soul.

We do a lot of work, which is right for us. We are a humanist faith, as much as we are any other type, believing in the necessity of action. One of the 5 Smooth Stones, which form the bedrock of our faith, is the need to manifest goodness, creating it in the world around us. James Luther Adams tells us that a liberal faith, sincerely held, must “express itself in societal forms”, creating institutions to enshrine liberty, education, and justice in our nation. Still, he says of “individual virtue” that it “is a prerequisite for societal virtues.” I will go a step further, restating the theme of my last post, and say that sincere individual virtue obligates us to manifest social virtues. In short, if the church were helping us to be spiritually healthy, then the protests and the celebrations would come as naturally to us as showing up on Sunday or calling a friend on her birthday. It would be an obligation of the spirit and of our sense of community, rather than a commandment from the pulpit or the newsletter.

At what point does our mission to gather after service and carpool to the Parade simply mirror the pilgrimage of the fundamentalist group, where members may not have strong feeling about the LGBT community, but feel compelled to protest the calls for equality as a sign of their faith?

We don’t need publicized missions. We don’t need uniforms. We don’t need national campaigns designed around visibility. We need people, moved by faith, doing good in every part of their lives. If we can inspire that, then we will already have changed the world.